Hays Specialist Recruitment and Fiat are impressed by the new expert location and translation features in Google's new enterprise search appliance (GSA). Entity recognition – which automatically classifies unstructured content and suggests content a user might be looking for – is also new in the 7.0 release.
Jacky Carter, head of eCRM at Hays Specialist Recruitment said in a press statement: "The improvements in the new GSA 7.0 give us a significant leap in capability. For example, entity recognition means we can now personalise job search results based on the jobseeker's user profile and make their browsing experience more targeted and relevant.
"We will also use this enhanced capability in our internal searching, which will result in faster and more relevant searches for our recruitment consultants when matching candidates to job roles," she said.
The new release has a previews functionality that Carter also welcomed.
"The new previews feature will enable us to avoid wasting valuable time clicking into documents and downloading local copies onto the hard drive, as well as giving our clients access to data via an extranet, without needing to download it," she said. "As we have offices in 33 countries, the addition of automatic translation will improve our local language job search capabilities, making it easier for clients to search outside of their local area for their next career move or prospective employees."
A spokesperson for Italian car company Fiat, another trialist, said: "We recognise that information sharing among teams, especially in an increasingly globalised model and distributed workforce, is essential to effective knowledge management and collaboration. Our company has already been using the Google Search Appliance and the entity recognition feature in version 7.0 enabled us to cluster search results and filter them based on relevance to our work.
Erik de Muinck Keizer, head of enterprise search for Google in Europe, reported that the company's engineers have been working on the new release for about 18 months.
"The release demonstrates our commitment to enterprise search and leverages Google.com's innovations around machine-learning algorithms, document previews, and the translation of search results," he said. "That's very important for international companies. And we've added Arabic."
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Integration with Sharepoint 2010 – in use at Google itself – has been included in the release. This came from customer demand to be able to find subject matter experts more easily within their own organisations, said De Muinck Keizer.
The search company said the product also to harnesses the "wisdom of crowds" – allowing employees to add their own search results.
"The search appliance should be more social over time," said De Muinck Keizer. "And, for me – in Europe – the translate function is great," he added.
He acknowledged competition, in enterprise search, from Microsoft's Fast and HP's Autonomy, but expressed confidence in Google as the only specialist in enterprise search.
"Our appliance also has out-of-the-box capability without meta tagging," said De Muinck Keizer.
He added that enterprise search and business intelligence will slowly grow towards each other.
The appliance costs $15,000 per year for hardware, software and support, indexing up to 500,000 items, on a two- or three-year licensing model. It can scale up to one billion plus items, "as many as the internet in 2006", said De Muink Keizer.
